


The shadows of trees

by Lia (Liafic)



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-21
Updated: 2013-11-21
Packaged: 2018-01-02 06:34:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,762
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1053636
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Liafic/pseuds/Lia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Draco works the case of a missing girl.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The shadows of trees

I pull the collar of my cloak up around my neck as my feet sink in to the wet earth at the edge of the marsh. Ahead, the black figures of the forensics team shift in and out of the shroud of mist that hangs over the early morning, and I run my hand over my eyes and shake myself awake. My body still aches for the warmth of my bed, and I can feel the damp of late autumn working its way between the layers of my clothing. It is five thirty in the morning, and I have been called out into the grey predawn to investigate a possible homicide.

The members of the forensics team nod as I pass, stepping through the pale blue ward that encloses the scene. I’ve been working this job for almost five years now and have become desensitised to the sight of death, feeling nothing but a cold and empty acceptance where once I would have shuddered. Granger used to hum with nervous energy on mornings like this, her wild hair tied into a passable knot as she paced the scene. She was unapologetic and obsessed about her job, and maybe that’s part of the reason we no longer work together.

So it is that I am alone here in the moors, the tall grass humming with crickets. The body is marked off at the edge of the water, a small pale thing, just barely a teenager, her still eyelashes casting shadows over her cheeks as the sun begins to rise pink beyond the trees on the horizon. Her wrists have been slashed to bleed out into the marsh, staining her bright blue cardigan and her jeans, her waterlogged trainers, and her wispy gold hair fans out around her head in the mud. She is quiet the way all dead things are quiet—an absence of sound that draws in everything else.

I hunch down beside the body and brush her hair from her eyes with my gloved hand. Her face is bruised along the right cheek and temple, part of her shoulder exposed by her torn cardigan. When I take her cold fingers in mine and examine her hands, the rust of her defensive wounds comes away on my gloves, and I drop her pale arm to the mud and stand. The cold of the moors prickles along the back of my neck, and I swallow hard as I head back to the team. There is nothing left to be done here.

.

This is the sort of job that can ruin marriages, which I suppose Granger discovered the hard way. Over our years of working together, I collected snippets of her personal information the same way some people collect stamps: it came to me in unexpected ways and from unexpected places, sometimes through offhand remarks she would throw across the space between us, the length of empty floor that separated our desks at the Ministry. I learned that she was proud, intelligent, beautiful in the way some wild animals are beautiful—and I learned that she loved work over everything else.

We had one conversation about this, though calling it a conversation might be a bit of a stretch. This was during the earlier days of our partnership, when we never really spoke about anything but the job, but it was a hard case and we were both working too late, drinking too much coffee, numbed by the buzzing of the office lights.

 _Go home,_ I told her. _Isn’t Weasley waiting up for you?_

 _Oh,_ she said, tucking a wisp of springy hair behind her ear, and her wedding ring glinted yellow gold in the light. _No, he doesn’t do that anymore._ She breathed in sharply and paused for a half second. _He thinks this job isn’t good for me. I think—sometimes, maybe he’s right._

_I thought you loved this job._

_It’s not that,_ she said. _Well, you know . . . men always need to be loved best._

She fluttered her hand in the air as though it meant nothing. This was the strange push and pull of our working relationship, and I sometimes wonder whether she held on to the small pieces of me that I gave her the same way I guarded my collection, stubbornly and secretly.

If she were still working here, she would have been the one to speak to the family. We got a possible identification on the dead girl from her magical signature, and for now her parents only know that their daughter has been reported missing from school and that we have called them in for an update. Granger would have strode out into the hall to greet them where they sit huddled on the wooden bench, all greying hair and tightly clasped hands, and she would have lowered herself beside them and reached over and broken the news gently but firmly.

As it is, only I am left in our dark and empty office, the crime scene photos spread out before me in grey mist and bright blue fabric. When I step into the hall, her parents barely have a chance to stand before the mother takes one look at my face and tilts against her husband, the air rushing out of her in a boneless slump.

.

Asteria is already asleep beside me when I hear the knock at my door, and I lift her hand from where it rests on my chest before dragging myself out of bed, pulling on jeans and a shirt. I expect to see the super, who sometimes chooses to come by at these late hours in hopes that no one will answer when he has to deliver the news about lift malfunctions or roof leaks or any other number of things that seem to go wrong in my building, but instead I swing open the door to find Pansy waiting there, silhouetted by the sconce lights in the hall.

“Are you going to ask me in?” she says before moving past me and hovering in the entryway, setting her clutch into the crook of her arm. She wears a cocktail dress and full makeup, though part of the stain on her lower lip has worn off, revealing a pale patch that I cannot help but stare at.

“I wasn’t expecting you,” I say, mostly because she has caught me off guard and there is little else. We have barely spoken since the end of school, and to see her standing in my foyer is surreal. “Keep your voice down.”

“You have company?”

“What do you want?” I mutter, closing the door behind her with a soft click.

Her fingers flutter up to the pale spot on her lip and rest there as she pauses, a habit she had during school and which I suppose she never abandoned. “I need to ask a favour.”

“Christ.” I run my hand through my hair, longer than I had it during school. Both of us have changed in some ways, following diverging paths over the years. For a brief moment, I wonder what might have happened if we stayed together after the war.

“It’s not—I didn’t want to come to you, all right? I know you don’t want anything to do with us.”

“Just spit it out.”

“It’s my daughter,” she says. “The headmistress got in touch earlier this evening. One of the other students went missing, and when they did a headcount, they discovered Violet missed her classes today and no one has seen her since curfew last night.”

“Has she ever done this before?” I ask, the loamy smell of the moors lurking at the back of my throat.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” she snaps.

“Calm down. I mean has she been having problems—has she run away before?”

Her hand flies up to her lips again, a tremor passing through her fingers though her voice is still cool. “You know how difficult it’s been for us since the war. She was . . . a lonely child.”

I nod and grab a notebook from the kitchen counter, grocery lists and phone numbers having been written and scratched out over the weeks. I remember seeing Pansy and her daughter once in the years since that time, back when she and Theo were still together, but I have never known Violet as anything more than a little dark-haired blur in the streets. She would be in her third year at school now, the same year as the dead girl. As I begin to jot down the particulars, Pansy reaches across the space between us and grips my wrists hard, her pointed red nails digging into my skin.

“I need you to find her, Draco,” she says. “I don’t care how you feel about me or the rest of us, but I need you to find my daughter.”

.

There was a case Granger worked in the years before I started, and I know it kept her up at night for months until they filed it away. The records are still sealed, but I have my ways of getting around these things, and something about the memory of it nags at me as I search through the files. It is nearing midnight and I am alone, the Ministry dark and restless, the empty bench outside my office waiting like a ghost in the hall.

When my fingers slip over the monotype file label, the teenage girl found four years ago and brushed off as a suicide, my pulse stutters in the hollow of my throat. The crime scene photos remain vivid, the victim a still figure as the reeds around her body rustle in the wind. It was a winter morning, and the red tassels of her scarf fanned out in the patchy snow of the moors. Her wrists were cut and she had no defensive wounds, but Granger was always sure there was more than met the eye. That was just the way she worked—and I understood that about her.

She lives in a small brick townhouse in the outskirts of London, and though it is almost one in the morning by the time I make my way there, a light still burns from behind the curtains of her kitchen window. When she opens the door, she looks me up and down but says nothing. I am still wearing my shirt and jeans and running my hand through my sleep-tousled hair, and I never shaved this morning.

“What are you doing here?” she says after a long moment. She is wearing a ratty shirt and flannel pyjama bottoms, and she smells like hot chocolate and cinnamon. Her hair curls out around her face as it always has, honey brown in the dim light.

“I need to show you something.”

“Are you drunk?” she says, as though it wouldn’t annoy her if I were but she would rather I be honest about it, and I push past her into the house and set the case files down on her counter.

“No, I’m not. This is a work thing.”

“I’m not an Auror anymore. You shouldn’t even be showing me those,” she says, though her gaze darts down to the files and stays there.

“All right,” I say. “Pretend I’m deputising you.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Granger, a body was found out on the moors this morning.” I watch her carefully, but she says nothing, so I continue: “Her name was Maggie Hansel. Teenage girl, wrists cut.”

She leans away from me and crosses her arms over her chest. “Why are you telling me this?” she says. On her left hand, her wedding band still glimmers, though I know Weasley moved out months ago and all his things are gone from the house. It feels strange to think of her drifting through these rooms without purpose, surrounded by nothing but memories.

“I need your help. Is that what you needed to hear?”

She glances at me for a moment before her expression steels and she opens the front door, letting in a drift of unseasonably cold night air. “You know I’m done with all this,” she says. “If that’s why you came, then get out.”

“I might just forget these files here, you know.”

“I’ll burn them,” she says, though her heart isn’t in it. I feel like this was the type of argument she may have had with Weasley before everything went to shit, and I balance on her doorstep as I move to leave.

“You aren’t going to find it, you know,” I say.

“What the hell are you on about?”

“Your next great love.” I flash her an empty smirk. “Weasley knew it and you know it, too: this is what you love best.”

I expect her to say something in return, some practised denial, but she remains silent and closes the door in my face. I am left alone on her deserted street, and I light a cigarette and stay there for a while, watching until her lamp flickers out behind the window, my shadow stretching long over the pavement.

.

I wake up from the cold. I guess Asteria stole the covers or I just kicked them off at some point during the night, and it is only four in the morning, but I can’t fall back asleep with the chill and the sound of traffic coming in through the open window. I know it bothers her that I come and go at such strange hours, and part of me resents that she has this thing she can hold over my head, though another part of me is too tired to care. It seems we always catch one another asleep, and she lies there now with her dark hair splayed over the pillow, her pale arm left bare on my empty side of the bed as I stand.

In the dark of the kitchen, I fill a kettle with water for coffee and watch the silhouettes of birds passing by overhead in the space between buildings, framed by the window above the sink. I think all coffee tastes the same, and Asteria says this is because the cigarettes have killed my senses—a bad habit I picked up over the years of late stakeouts and have never been able to shake. Eventually, she must hear me moving around, because she walks into the kitchen and sits at the small table, tying her hair back loosely as we wait for the kettle to boil.

“I might let my lease expire at the end of the year, start looking for a new place,” she finally says, since she knows by now that I would never break a good silence.

I light a cigarette and prop open the window. The air that rushes in feels bitter with wet autumn, the promise of snow. “You know I don’t mind if you stay here in the meantime,” I say. The kettle whistles, and I don’t really expect her to reply, so when she looks up at me from yesterday’s _Prophet,_ I’m only half listening.

“Is there something you want to tell me?” she says.

“Like what?”

“I don’t know—something? Is there something going on with you?”

I know she isn’t accusing me of anything, that she has never expected more than I can give. She simply loves me in a way I suspect I will never be able to return, and my thoughts suddenly and inexplicably flit to the image of Granger alone in that house, waiting with the lamp on late into the night.

“No,” I reply. “It’s just work shit. There’s nothing going on.”

.

The streets are cold and damp as I trek in to the Ministry at this ungodly hour of the morning only to find Granger sitting behind the window of the café across the street, her legs turned from her seat as if she plans to stand at any minute. Her hair is still wet, wisps of curl having come loose from her bun and tumbled down the back of her neck, and her paper cup steams as I approach and tap on the glass, my reflection superimposed over her face. Her gaze darts up toward me, and we stare at one another for a moment before she collects her briefcase and meets me on the pavement.

“What are you doing here this early?” I ask. Apart from the owner of the all-hours café and the occasional car that passes on the street, I feel as though we are the only alive people in the city.

“I could ask the same of you,” she says.

“We’ve had a search team out all night for another missing girl: Violet Parkinson, same year as the victim from yesterday.”

The name clearly rings a bell for her, though she says nothing else, adjusting her grip on her briefcase. It has begun to rain in a slow mist that shimmers on the cobblestones, and when she starts walking toward the Ministry, I naturally follow as though this has been our mutual destination all along.

Having her back in what used to be our office is like seeing something from a childhood memory only to find that it has faded over the years. She stands in the space between our desks, still holding her briefcase in hands covered by pale cream mittens, her face washed out by the electric lights.

“I’m sorry for dragging you into this,” I say.

She sets her briefcase down on my desk, pulling out the files she never burned. “You think there’s a connection between the cases, right?” she says.

“I’m not sure.” I run a hand through my hair and feel around in my coat pocket for my last pack of cigarettes, and she says nothing as I light up and exhale my jittery nerves. “The similarities were bothering me. Maggie Hansel had defensive wounds, so it couldn’t have been a suicide, even though the coroner found hesitation marks.”

She is perched against the edge of my desk, staring out into the dark and empty hall through our office window. “You know, I think during that first case, part of me wanted to believe it was a homicide because I just couldn’t understand it,” she says. I wonder whether she is talking to me or to herself. “Why would someone so young want to kill herself, there in the middle of nowhere?”

After a long silence, I grind out my ashes in the rubbish bin. “Why are you doubting your instincts now?”

“I’m not. I just—there was a lot I didn’t understand about the world back then.”

“Everything in the file pointed to a suicide, so why were you so convinced there was more to it?”

“It was just a feeling. I mean, she wore a coat and gloves and—if she had wanted to kill herself, staying warm wouldn’t have mattered.” She exhales and watches the photo absently: the reeds still waver, the red tassels of the girl’s scarf still weighed down and wet in the snow. “Now I wonder, though, if we still go through our routines even then, if part of us still clings to life despite everything else.”

I reach over and take the photo, tucking it back into the case file. Later, I will find a way to get it back into the sealed archive, where it will capture the still body of a dead girl until the end of time. “Is this why you quit?” I say before thinking better of it. “This job, it fucks us up and makes us complicated.”

She looks up at me. Against the acrid smell of smoke, she still leans forward with a hint of coffee, of peppermint soap. “No, that’s not why I left,” she says. On the desk, her mitten-covered hand rests just beyond the tip of my fingers over the closed file, and she hesitates before pulling it away and standing. “Come on,” she says. “We have a missing girl to find.”

.

We join the search team as the sun rises higher into the morning sky, blanketing the frosted marshland with a white-gold haze. I exhale into my hands to warm them against the chill, here in the miles and miles of wilderness that surround the school. Violet could be anywhere, and the team has been using a grid system on foot as well as scanning in flight from overhead. As I am debriefed under the open tent, Granger stands in the tall grass a distance away, scanning the horizon and blinking in the brightness of the sun.

The search lasts for hours. By the time we reach the edge of the forest, my voice is hoarse, my shoes are soaked through, and my fingers are numb. Beside me, Granger walks with spots of colour high in her cheeks, her steps still long and purposed. She is in her element after so many months of wandering, and I follow her through the reeds and frozen patches of water the same way a child follows a butterfly, a flicker of colour in the bleak landscape.

She pauses at the first tree, resting her hand over the damp bark. Years of smoking have wreaked havoc on my lungs, and I mask my gasping with a hoarse cough as she closes her eyes and blinks back the sting of the cold.

“Smoking kills, you know,” she says.

“Careful,” I reply. “You sound like my girlfriend.”

She leans against the bark again, a flicker of a smile breaking through the corner of her lips. For a moment, it feels as though everything in the world has stilled: all that remains are the cold sun and the shadows of trees. It happens so simply, when I turn and see the small figure huddled against the base of the trees further in. She could be anything else in the world, a pale smudge against the darkness, and I find myself moving before I can think clearly.

She is still and cold, her eyes closed and her gloves stained with blood, and I drop to my knees and then lurch up again, my heart pounding in the absence of all feeling. Granger hunches next to the body and tears off her mittens, feeling for a pulse while I pull myself together and lean back down. Her wand is out in the next instant, a shower of red sparks bursting up into the air overhead. In the silence, Violet blinks open her glassy eyes and leans forward into the crook of my shoulder, her dark hair tangled and limp against my hands.

Against the flood of sound and movement, I hear my own voice but never realise what I am saying until Granger repeats it, leaning beside the girl in a rush of warmth and whispering, “You’re fine, you’re fine. Everything’s going to be all right.”

.

Violet was a small and fragile thing against her white hospital pillows. When I went in to talk to her, Pansy waited in the hall and paced, wearing at her lip and clacking across the floor like a metronome, the worry and relief of it etched out in new lines across her face. The story came out in pieces: two lonely girls with a suicide pact, a momentary hesitation, a fight over a knife. It was too late, and she ran to get help but became lost in the moors. In the end, Granger was right after all: part of us still clings to life despite everything else.

This is no longer a case for my department, and I close the file and tuck it away like the one Granger agonised over so many years ago. Was it a coincidence that both those girls choose the moors to die? I imagine there must be some satisfaction in being truly alone after feeling alone in a crowd for so long, and when I think about Maggie Hansel and her blue cardigan and her bright blood, I wonder if the last thing she saw was the stars, high and bright overhead against a vast darkness.

This job makes us complicated—that much I know.

.

I forgot to shut off the lamp by the couch before falling asleep tonight, drunk and sprawled loosely over the cushions, and the brightness of it blinds me when I wake up to knocking at my door. As I shake myself into awareness, I see Granger standing there, her jacket and eyelashes dotted with the first early snowflakes.

“Any update on Violet?” she says as she moves past me and into the flat, taking in the state of the place since she last saw it. In truth, not much has changed.

“The hospital is treating her for hypothermia. She’ll be all right in a few days,” I reply, running the back of my hand across my bleary eyes. I feel as though I have been asleep for hours, but when I glance at the clock over the oven I see it has been barely twenty minutes, just after one in the morning. The bitter taste of smoke and alcohol still lingers at the back of my throat, and I announce to no one in particular, “I’m going to make some coffee.”

“No, sit down,” she says. “I’ll make it. I know where everything—I mean, you still keep it in the same cupboard?”

I hum a reply, settling back into the couch, still warm with the imprint of my body. Now that she is here, draping her scarf and jacket over the back of a chair and moving around my kitchen, I feel like the months since she quit her job have dwindled into insignificance. When she joins me on the couch, she smells like snow, and she sits with her knees together and her elbows tucked in as she sips her coffee.

“I think I try too hard, maybe,” she says, blowing the steam off the top of her chipped mug. “I wanted to make things perfect with Ron, as if that was some sort of reward for what we went through in the war, and I was afraid if I acknowledged that sometimes things just happen and relationships just fall apart, everything else would have meant nothing.”

“Would that have been so bad?” I say. “Not everything has to have a reason.”

“That was just the way I worked. I felt too insignificant otherwise.”

I stare down into my coffee and watch the steam curl up in the lamplight. I still feel vaguely drunk, but everything has become vivid with her here. She has always broken up the monochrome pattern of my life, and I have acknowledged this over the years in the quietest corners of my mind, first with hatred and then with some other amorphous emotion that we never named. I see my hand on her shoulder as though it exists outside me, and she looks up at me for one long moment. When I kiss her, she keeps her hands around her mug and stiffens, and I pull away.

“I’m sorry,” I say.

“It’s been a long day,” she replies. Her shoulders slump, and she exhales. “I can’t do this again, Malfoy. I’m still married.”

“I understand,” I say, but she sets her mug down hard on my coffee table and turns to me.

“No, it’s stupid. I know it’s stupid,” she says. “I kept thinking I could work things out with Ron even after me and you . . . after I made that mistake, and I held on to the belief that the first dead girl was murdered because I just couldn’t accept it, that not every problem can be solved, that not everything makes sense.”

“It’s okay, Granger,” I tell her. My hand drops from her shoulder, and I expect to feel annoyance or hurt but instead feel an emptiness like the mist on the marshes echoing through me. We have all made our choices over the years, and mine have led me here.

“I’m sorry,” she says.

“It’s okay.”

She stands and moves to the door, and I follow after her as I have always followed and watch as she gathers her things. On the doorstep, she turns to me as if there are a thousand things she wants to say, and her hand flutters up briefly to the side of my face before she drops it and walks away, back to the dark streets and her empty house. On the coffee table, our mugs sit side by side as they used to all those months ago, and I light a cigarette and watch the snow fall through the window.


End file.
